Scene statistics is a discipline within the field of perception. It is concerned with the statistical regularities related to scenes. It is based on the premise that a perceptual system is designed to interpret scenes.

Biological perceptual systems have evolved in response to physical properties of natural environments.[1] Therefore natural scenes receive a great deal of attention.[2]

Within the domain of images/scenes, one can study the characteristics of information related to redundancy and efficient coding.

Across-domain statistics determine how an autonomous system should make inferences about its environment, process information, and control its behavior. To study these statistics, it is necessary to sample or register information in multiple domains simultaneously.

The image above[4] was generated from a database of segmented leaves that simultaneously registers natural images (scene information) with the exact locations of leaf boundaries (information about the physical environment). Such a database can be used to study across-domain statistics.

↑Howe, C. Q., & Purves, D. (2002). Range image statistics can explain the anomalous perception of length. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(20), 13184–13188.

↑Howe, C. Q., & Purves, D. (2005a). Natural-scene geometry predicts the perception of angles and line orientation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(4), 1228–1233.

↑Howe, C. Q., & Purves, D. (2005b). The Muller–Lyer illusion explained by the statistics of image-source relationships. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(4), 1234–1239.

↑Howe, C. Q., Yang, Z. Y., & Purves, D. (2005). The Poggendorff illusion explained by natural scene geometry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(21), 7707–7712.